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Ted Rall

Retraction: 9,000 Dead? Maybe, Maybe Not.

I draw more than 200 cartoons a year, but this has never happened to me before: commenting on a story that turns out to be, if not bogus, at least inadequately sourced. Of course, an editorial cartoonist is always commenting on other people’s reporting, so he or she is always vulnerable to the possibility of being taken in by some jackass. Consider, for example, all the cartoonists who did cartoons about Saddam postulating what he’d do with hiis nuclear weapons!

To be make this short, I’m not apologizing because I have nothing to apologize for. I read a story that came off as possible, sourced it using previously reliable informants, and ended up doing a cartoon that I wouldn’t have done had I known then what I know now.

So this is a retraction of this past Monday’s “C” cartoon. Did 9,000-plus soldiers get killed in Iraq? Maybe, maybe not. But as a cartoonist friend of mine points out: The relatives of those hidden 7,000 dead troops sure would be raising hell if the Pentagon were trying to hide them. To which I respond: Duh.

The battery in my BS detector must have been running low last week.

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Ted Rall

TBR News a Fraud?

F.C. writes:

I want to preface this e-mail by saying that my political leanings are far left and I love reading your articles, comics and blog.
That said, I must point out the site you provided as a source has been discredited beyond cavil:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/jim-lampley/the-ultimate-deception_2838.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/jim-lampley/a-poor-choice-of-sources_2891.html
Again, do not get me wrong, it is not that I cannot posit the criminal-in-thief lying about US troop casulaties but TBRnews.org is not the best way to prove it.
Frankly, as a collateral point, I do not think there is any need to lie about troop deaths – the American public is by and large in a consumeristic [sic?] frenzy (or is it stupor?) who do not care anyway. Time to move onwards!

The Huffington site comments section contains several allegations that TBR News is related to The Barnes Report and is affiliated with wacko Holocaust revisionist types like David Irving. If so, please ignore anything they say.

I’m looking into it, including trying to reconfirm my independent source(s). As F.C. writes, we don’t need to copy the right by lying about them–the truth is damning enough.

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Ted Rall

Editor & Publisher Mention

E&P mentions my cartoon in a small piece. Maybe this will spark a discussion and some plain talk from the Pentagon.

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Ted Rall

Real Number of Iraq War Dead: More Than 9,000

Some emailers are asking for source material on today’s cartoon about American war dead in Iraq. You can find one reference here, and there are others elsewhere. In addition, I have independently confirmed this news with appropriately-placed sources.

God bless America–with George W. Bush running the joint into the ground, we need all the help we can get.

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Ted Rall

Rodney Crowell

Jim advises me:

In the new issue of Paste, a music and pop culture mag, there’s a review of Rodney Crowell’s new CD (two stars) that has a prominent blurb that references your work:
“Crowell overstates his point by a Texas mile, constructing a gigantic Ted Rall cartoon version of bourgeois capitalist piggery.”
Thought I’d pass it on, in case you haven’t seen it.

Yeah, well, maybe I do overstate my case sometimes. Sometimes you need to do that to begin to counter the tsunami of lies and perverted logic flooding us from the right.

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Ted Rall

Book Review: “War Powers”

My review of Peter Irons’ important new book “War Powers”–about how presidents have stolen Congress’ power to declare war under the Constitution–appears in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune.

Book Review: “War Powers,” by Peter Irons

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Ted Rall

War Powers
Peter Irons
How The Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution
Metropolitan Books, $25, 304 pp.

The United States Constitution can be vexingly vague—the placement of a comma separates those who believe that the Second Amendment permits private citizens to own firearms from those who say it limits gun ownership to the military—but it is crystal clear on the matter of war. As every schoolchild learns, only Congress may send troops into battle.

The last time this happened was some 63 years ago, the day after the Pearl Harbor bombing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked “Congress [to] declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December seventh, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.” Congress, minus one dissident, voted yes.

We haven’t seen a declared war since FDR delivered his famous speech, yet the United States spent nearly every day of the last half of the 20th century fighting someone somewhere. Three major conflicts—Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War—deployed more than 17 million soldiers of whom 92,122 were killed. In addition, American troops killed and died in countless, mostly forgotten, so-called “low intensity conflicts.” During the late spring of 1962, for example, President Kennedy ordered 5,000 Marines to invade Thailand. U.S. forces secretly fought in at least four Congolese civil conflicts, in 1964, 1967, 1978 and 1991. Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983. The first President Bush invaded Panama in 1989; President Clinton intervened in Somalia and Kosovo in 1993. And that’s not even counting the CIA’s black-op shenanigans.

Our brand-new century hasn’t given pacifists cause for optimism. Since 2001 hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have fought against increasingly powerful enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Officially 214 Americans have been killed so far in Afghanistan and about 1,900 in Iraq. (Soldiers who die on planes leaving Kabul or Baghdad, or at military hospitals in Germany and elsewhere, are not counted. Because of this policy, Pentagon sources say the real death toll is over 9,000 for Iraq alone.) George W. Bush also armed and trained the perpetrators of coups against the governments of Haiti, Kyrgyzstan and Venezuela, of which the first two succeeded.

How can presidents fight so many wars without obtaining authorization from Congress? Since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, explains UC San Diego law professor Peter Irons, “Congress has been a willing, often eager accomplice in handing its constitutional war powers to presidents.” His new “War Powers” lucidly and terrifyingly tracks this “increasing subversion of the U.S. Constitution” to demonstrate what anyone who’s ever driven over the speed limit already knows: it’s easy to break the law when everyone else doe it. Even more damning, according to Irons, is that few seem to mind: “Successive generations of Americans, unwilling to force their elected representatives to reclaim their powers from presidents who have ordered troops into dozens of undeclared wars, have abetted the undermining of the fundamental structure of the government.”

This isn’t a debate between liberals who see the Constitution as a living document and conservatives who search for the Founders’ “original intent.” The Philadelphia delegates, notes Irons, were determined to not to replicate the “evils of…monarchies.” A king didn’t need permission to declare war. That broad power, believed the Founders, made it too easy to wage them.

Only a single delegate favored “vesting the power [to declare war] in the President” and the current wording, vesting war powers with Congress, passed overwhelmingly.

The president is also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but as such he may only deploy troops in a defensive posture, to repel invaders—by far the most likely scenario in 1793, when the U.S. was economically and militarily powerless. “The Framers,” argues Irons, “agreed that the president could act without a congressional declaration of war to repel an invasion but that only Congress could authorize the deployment of forces outside the nation’s territory in combat against foreign troops.” When the British invaded the U.S. during the War of 1812, the president was clearly authorized to act without awaiting word from Congress. Similarly, FDR could order troops into combat to repel the Japanese from Hawaii. But legally invading Japanese territory, even as part of a punitive or preemptive strike, still required him to get the OK from Capitol Hill.

In Federalist Paper No. 69, a newspaper article arguing for ratification of the new Constitution, Alexander Hamilton explained to the American public that the president’s title as commander-in-chief was chiefly ceremonial: “While [the powers] of the British kings extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies, all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the Legislature.”

Early presidents, perhaps because they had been present for the deliberations that led to the formation of the new republic, respected the constitutional separation of war powers. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, writing to Congress in 1790 on behalf of President Washington about America’s first foreign policy crisis—the Regent of Algiers, a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, was holding 21 American sailors hostage—stated that “it rests with Congress to decide between war, tribute, and ransom.” Washington awaited Congress’ choice.

“War Powers” relates the background and disposition of two centuries of the curious intersection between war as foreign policy and civil litigation, particularly as seen through Supreme Court precedents. To read Irons telling it, increasingly militarily aggressive presidents stole Congress’ power to make war by repeatedly twisting the definitions of their powers as defined in the Constitution and by relying on some of the most flawed and cowardly decisions to have ever been generated by the courts, all while ordinary citizens cheered approvingly.

There were exceptions. In 1858 President Buchanan told Congress that his authority in foreign affairs “is limited to the employment of diplomacy alone. When this fails, it can proceed no further.” But exceptions are few by definition.

Theodore Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War marked the beginning of America’s rise as a colonial empire to rival the Europeans and the end of the republican idea that war should never be waged without the overwhelming support of the citizenry as expressed through their elected representatives. Presidents enjoyed an “inherent” right to deploy troops without consulting Congress, TR and his successors argued, and too few have raised their voices against this new paradigm to make a difference.

In 1903 he launched our first small war of choice, a gambit that has since become the United States’ preferred means of exerting military power. When Colombia, which then included modern-day Panama, refused to allow the U.S. to build a canal across the isthmus under the terms it sought, Roosevelt “encouraged a revolt by Panamanians and sent warships to prevent Colombia from sending troops to Panama.” The new Republic of Panama, a puppet state, yielded sovereignty over the new Canal Zone to the U.S. Congress approved the military intervention retroactively. “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on the canal does also,” Roosevelt bragged later.

Since then neither Congress nor the courts have been inclined to call presidents to account when they overstep their constitutional powers. The Supreme Court, in Korematsu v. United States (1943) and related cases, went so far as to rule that Franklin Roosevelt was authorized to round up and imprison thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans in concentration camps because, as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote, “The war power of the national government is ‘the power to wage war successfully.'” Few Americans should require formal training to recognize the faulty legal l’état, c’est moi reasoning at work, yet this decision has never been reversed. After 9/11, White House lawyers relied on Korematsu as a precedent justifying the internment of thousands of Muslims in Guantánamo Bay and Homeland Security concentration camps.

As a reviewer I’m obliged to point out the pitfalls of Irons’ work, but given the elegantly presented arguments presented in a delightfully conversational style about a monumentally important, yet woefully underdiscussed issue it would be churlish—and virtually impossible—to do so. My only beef with “War Powers” is its innate pessimism: he doesn’t expect Congress to take back its war powers, or for we the people to wake the hell up. But then, let’s be honest. Neither do I.

Two hundred years of constitutional devolution is difficult to correct, but the big question is: should we care? After all, if everyone drives 70 in a 55 mph zone, maybe it’s the speed limit that’s wrong. If the American people are satisfied with an imperial president who single-handedly decides when to go to war, why worry about some crumbling piece of paper at the National Archives says?

Slippery slopes offer one reason. Powerful men strive to accrue more control. Unchecked, they become dictators. No one should rest easily now that, for example, George W. Bush has signed a secret presidential directive authorizing him to order anyone, anywhere—including Americans—assassinated as an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terror,” no evidence of wrongdoing necessary.

A nation that ignores its fundamental legal underpinnings, moreover, is by definition lawless. Once one basic stricture has broken down, what’s to prevent the rest from following suit? The old Soviet Union, after all, also had a wonderful constitution.

© 2005 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

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Ted Rall

Today I Read the New York Times with You

I haven’t looked at the paper yet. (That’s right, I still read the physical paper. If I still had a day job I’d no doubt be slacking off reading the whole thing online and saving money in the process, but I don’t which means I have to actually work for a living. So today, for the first and possibly past time, you get to follow along while I react to today’s news, as brought to you by the New York Times.

Today’s lead story quotes the (cough) Pentagon as claiming that some roadside bombs used by Iraqi insurgents are manufactured in Iran. It’s just another floater for possibe war against Iran because, hey, we’ve got so many more troops to send to death and so many more billions a week to spend. The money quote:

But just as troubling is that the spread of the new weapons seems to suggest a new and unusual area of cooperation between Iranian Shiites and Iraqi Sunnis to drive American forces out – a possibility that the commanders said they could make little sense of given the increasing violence between the sects in Iraq.

Once again, the crux of cluelessness. The reason “enemy” Sunnis and Shiites are cooperating against us is because they both want us to get the fuck out of their country. What’s surprising about that? Oh, but they’ll have to fight each other after we leave. That’s true. But they have to cooperate in the common fight against the United States if either wants the chance to rule post-Bushite Iraq.

On the editorial page, op-ed “writer” John Tierney has surpassed his reliable inanity:

Polar bears are mammals with a mission, whether it’s Gus obsessively swimming in the Central Park Zoo, or the mother and her cub that I once followed during a dogsled expedition here in the Canadian high Arctic. We watched her with awe and kept our distance, especially after coming across the bloody remnants of her seal dinner on the ice. The message I took home was: “You mess with my habitat, and I’ll mess with you.”

The name of the column: “The Good News Bears.”

Every day I read the New York Times’ entropic op-ed page, I’m reminded of how the nation’s greatest newspaper has a section unworthy of most high school newspapers. Yeah, yeah, I like Krugman too. But still.

Every now and then the Times publishes a piece that makes you wonder why they’re just getting to a story now, months after you’ve already read and digested it. “C.I.A. Leak Case Recalls Texas Incident in ’92 Race” is a classic case. It’s a rehash of something that we Treasongate watchers have long known: Rove has a history of exactly the sort of sorry shit he pulled on Valerie Plame. On the other hand, the Times’ sluggishness has the salutory effect of keeping the story in the news.

There’s a piece about Gitmo getting leaner and (!) meaner:

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By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: August 6, 2005

WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 – In a few years, Pentagon officials say, the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, will have undergone a radical transformation.
The sprawling detention site known as Camp Delta, with its watchtowers, double-wide trailers housing rows of steel cells and interrogation rooms will be mostly demolished.
Instead, a sharply reduced inmate population of those the military considers the most hard-core will inhabit two nearby hard-walled modern prisons. The newest of those, which is still under construction, is modeled on a modern county jail in Michigan and is designed to counter international criticism of Guantánamo as inhumane and, to some, a symbol of American arrogance.
The first step in changing the character of Guantánamo, officials say, is to relocate many of the 520 detainees. As part of that effort, Defense and State Department officials said this week that they had reached agreement with Afghanistan to transfer 110 Afghan detainees to their home country. Eventually, the population will be reduced to 320, the capacity of the permanent prison buildings.

Sure, this is Judith Miller-style transcription journalism–some “journalist” typing what some government official tells him–but it’s interesting as a trial balloon/statement of intent. The Gitmo concentration camp is becoming, as its Soviet predessors did, more permanent. It also belies, in the case of the 110 guys being shipped back to Afghanistan, repeated Administration claims that all of the Gitmo detainees were “the worst of the worst,” guys so evil we could never, ever release them.

And now I need coffee. Along with regime change.

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Ted Rall

The Average Soldier

I get a lot of military email, some positive and some negative. I was impressed by this one from Johnny:

Hi Mr. Rall,
I saw you on Foxnews a few times, and while I disagreed with some of the things you said, I went to your site and check back on it about once a week. I know that you can’t just always believe everything you are told and sometimes the opposition is right. I do have a problem with how you treat the military though. I have been in ROTC for the past four years and as soon as I am done my masters I am going to commission fulfilling my contract. I contracted four years ago because I wanted to serve my country and “fight the good fight” against anyone who tried to do our country harm. Many of my fellow cadets are in the same boat as me, came from an average family, good students, ( I have a 3.9 cum GPA now ), just wanting to do our service, finish it, and move on with your lives. We could have never predicted what we would eventually have to end up doing and where we would be going but it is the government, and you can’t back out once you’ve signed the dotted line. We were not recruited and lied to, we went into it knowing full well what we were getting into. There are many many many great people in the Army ( and other branches ). Many joined for training opportunities or just to do their duty. Yet all I ever see in your comics/other writings, is disdain for the military, continually calling all of us torturers and gun wielding fanatics. While some have done such things, it embarrasses many of us to be in the same military as them. They are not soldiers out of line, they are criminals. But you must see that many of us are just normal guys that signed up for a job because we wanted to, and therefore we must do what we are required to. Foreign policy is not our fault, it is the governments. We are supposed to clean up the mess when the government can’t seal the deal. Please reconsider your stance on the average soldier, blame the government for where we are all you want, but I know that when you portray soldiers in the light you do, it really hurts me and many of my colleagues that someone would look down on us, when we are just trying to do something positive for our country. I am sorry for the length of this e-mail but after following your web site for a little over a year now, I felt it was time to voice myself and hopefully get your opinion on this subject at hand. Thank you

Point taken. The vast majority of soldiers have not (presumably) engaged in the sort of atrocities committed daily at US concentration camps like Abu Ghraib and Bagram. But let’s get real: people join the military in order to kill people. Or, at bare minimum, they’re willing to kill people. That’s what the military does, and everybody understands that. I doubt that even the lyingest son-of-a-bitch recruiter claims otherwise.

Unfortunately, dutiful soldiers get lumped in with the sadists when they refuse to stand tall, in public, to denounce those whose behavior disgraces the armed services. Especially disconcerting to those of us who wish to believe the best about the men and women serving in uniform is the way they applaud criminal mass murderers like George W. Bush at public appearances–e.g., the notorious “mission accomplished” appearance. It is also sad to see so few soldiers prosecuted for refusing to serve in the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Mass resistance, even from 1 percent of the armed forces, would prompt the kind of national reconsideration that might bring an end to Bush’s madness, and yet it’s not forthcoming.

One last point: career soldiers who enlisted before Bush can be excused for being stuck fighting wars which they may or may not believe to be justified. But anyone who enlisted since–or in the future–is fully aware of what he or she is getting into.

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